Spring and Sunflowers

With Spring finally in the air Sophie and i are busy working in the garden planting more seeds and preparing the boarders ready for the year ahead.  Sophie is so much more competent this year as she already has a year of gardening under her belt and she knows how to plant a seed and is the main person that does all the watering in the garden, this is great child labour to have around the garden as i can set up the next task or get on with my own activity and we work side by side talking about what we are doing.

This year we have focused on planting lots of pretty flowers as well as vegetables about the garden and we have trays of seeds all planted and stacked up in the greenhouse.  Our peas and beans are storming through and i think we may have to plant them out in a few weeks time.

This year we have invited some of our new blogging friends to participate and challenge us in a sunflower race and see who can grow this tallest sun flower and we sent some seeds from our packet to them and at the end of September we will all measure and see who grew the tallest sunflower.  Karen and her sons from Really missing sleep will be a two pronged attack on our challenge Karens blog is the must go read if you ever wondered about a product and wanted a truthful review on what she as a mummy and her sons thought about all those products that bam bozaled parents.  Elizabeth from the blog Margot and Barbara is also participating with her daughter, i love her blog and is a nice place to escape to with a cup of tea, she writes about all sorts of things crafting, life and gardening a soul similar to mine.  So with our Challengers set Sophie got down to business and got her green fingers busy popping her sunflower seeds into some compost and gave them all a good water.

We also put out some bird nesting material as we do every year, but this year the birds were offered a luxury version of all the left over colourful Marino wool bits and bobs i had collected from felting, we put this in a orange bag and Sophie hung it from the tree.  I think the local Squirrel had been watching us as we saw him run up the tree and swipe the lot making off at speed with his colourful loot.

With so much good weather we decided to ditch the expensive car and dust off the bike to cycle to all the groups we attend during the week.  I am such a woose, i will admit to being a fair weather cycler and why would you not on a day with warm spring breeze blowing through your hair and the sun on your face as we used our peddle power to get to our destinations.

With the warm sunshine Sophie was allowed to play with some water in the garden so i found an old travelling box that we used when we moved house and filled it with water and her toys, then a flash of inspiration i wired on her water wheel to the side of the box for her to pour water through.  Ha who need to spend £45 on a water table, thrifty to the rescue again.